Bloggy Housekeeping Tasks

We’ve recently rolled out a new page, called “Need Help?” In it we list a variety of resources and aid agencies from around the world. The list is incomplete, and focused a great deal on English-language resources. If you are aware of any resources that are not listed, please let me know so I can updated it accordingly.

We’ve also recently set up a delicious account that people can send links to! The account itself is at www.delicious.com/feminists , although it’s mostly going to be used as a way for people to send links to us easily. If you use delicious, anything you tag “disfem” or “disfeminists”, or send “to:feminists” is going to get to us. Suggestions for Recommended Reading, for resources for the “Need Help?” page, or for Further Reading would be great!

If you don’t have a delicious account, don’t hesitate to use recreading AT disabledfeminists DOT com for any link-leaving needs!

As a reminder, we don’t often check the @feminists twitter account for @replies. It’s almost entirely an automated twitter that we log into occasionally. It’s far better to email someone or even leave a comment if you have a concern.

I should note that we don’t link everything that comes to us for our Recommended Reading. This is because there is a lot of stuff out there, and we do try and pull from a variety of places, both in blog-terms and in physical locations. Mostly the aim of Recommended Reading is to show that there are a wide variety of blogs out there that discuss disability and disability-related issues and oppressions, and to keep track of news stories that may be of interest to our readers.

That all said: I hope folks who enjoy the World Cup (*cough* abby jean *cough*) are enjoying the World Cup. I’m going to take myself to the coffee shop so no one tries to tell me about it anymore!

And s.e.! Ou did a lot of the work, mostly in the organizing. Anyone who knows me knows my organizing is “throw everything in a drawer and hope I can find later”. That work is tedious and I really appreciate ou doing it.

On a resource-related note (since there’s no easy place for comments on the “Need Help?” page itself), one thing that really has irritated me in the past, and which I noticed once again because of this page, is that there’s not enough in the way of depression/mental health resources that are convenient for deaf and hard of hearing people. The (US) National Suicide Prevention Hotline offers a TTY number, but that’s quickly becoming an outdated technology nowadays; SMS and IM have largely supplanted it. Other services don’t even offer that level of accessibility, more often than not.

And even then, the TTY-based resources aren’t always available— and for those who do dare to call via relay, the people behind the phone-based resources don’t always know what to do. I might’ve mentioned it before here, but one of my online friends (now deceased) once attempted to seek support during a bout of depression. She called the TTY number for her campus emergency line, and nobody answered. She then called her campus emergency line via relay, and rather than thinking it was actually a depressed individual who needed attention, they thought it was someone testing their ADA compliance and didn’t take the case seriously!

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Kristin Brooks Hopeline, one of the resources you linked, is planning on addressing this with an online chat-based support system coming this fall. And even cooler, they didn’t frame this in a disability context— rather, they framed it in a context of universal accessibility, in a culture that’s becoming less phone-centered and more online-savvy as a whole.

LOL @ the world cup enthusiasm! I am actually following sort of ish – my department has a World Cup betting competition going on, with the possibility of a random entry (and, because we are mathematicians, a long discussion on how to properly randomly model football scores!) I signed up just in order to raise the chance for someone with a random entry to win, because I want to see all our football enthusiasts explode…

Funnily enough, after a lot of debating whether or not I wanted to bet on Germany to win (complicated thoughts re: patriotism and nationalism and the way my countrypeople behaved during the last World Cup) and deciding to just go for a random entry, my random entry… has Germany beating everyone. So. Uh. Go Germany?